Pubdate: Fri, 07 Jun 2013
Source: Albany Democrat-Herald (OR)
Copyright: 2013 Lee Enterprises
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/HPOp5PfB
Website: http://www.democratherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/7
Author: Allan Erickson
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v13/n242/a10.html
Thanks to the Democrat-Herald for your editorial, "Americans see pot
war as futile fight" (Monday, June 3).
Approached from the federal view, pot prohibition is a rousing success.
With a veritable alphabet soup of government agencies involved in
preventing marijuana from getting into the hands of U.S. adults, the
drug war is a bureaucrat's dream. A massive bureaucracy that creates
the very problems it was created to eliminate can go on forever.
Why does alcohol have a monopoly on legal intoxication? If we compare
the number of fatal alcohol poisonings per year to the number of
fatal pot poisonings, you see alcohol causes approximately 80,000
deaths annually (according to the CDC) and marijuana zero.
Can pot be used irresponsibly? Of course. But so can political office.
Should everyone smoke pot? No. But then again, a lot of politicians
should never have been elected.
Without a legal system of regulation, the cartels and various other
criminals will maintain their grip on the profits from the bulk of
pot sold in the U.S.
One need not be pro-pot to be anti pot prohibition.
Allan Erickson, Eugene
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom